Conferences are becoming ever more important in the business world. The practice already exists of holding conferences with people who are physically present in a conference room and people who are not in the conference room but rather, for example, at a job site, working from home, or located somewhere else, wherein the people who are not physically present are included via electronic means of communication. So that all conference participants can be seen appropriately, it is preferable from a social standpoint if people who know each other better can also convey that while communicating. The many social contacts that are also but not only cultivated through social networks and via digital communication media, together with increasingly busy schedules, mean that people who are not in the room are not recognized or activities in common are forgotten. This has also been described as “digital dementia.” In such cases, a conference participant is treated as an outsider, which leads to irritation and can impair the conference. In addition, “experiences” that have occurred with a specific conference participant in the past can make it possible, for example, to reach a solution more rapidly if personal preferences, sensitive issues, or areas open to compromise are known. If such experiences are known for each conference participant, it can increase the productivity of a conference.
Previously it was not possible to learn about personal qualities and characteristics unless there was time to do so during the conference, or unless there was a prior conversation about who was there, where participants had previously met, and how well they knew each other. There is often no time for this, and so these possibilities are lost, especially if a participant is not physically present in the conference room. In such situations, something that could be a powerful tool for rapidly establishing an efficient and successful discussion, individual trust, or understanding often goes unused. A discussion related to this lack could drag on unnecessarily, because the participants didn't fully understand each other at first.
One goal of the present invention is to offer a method and a device for managing communications in conferences that can at least in part overcome the aforementioned disadvantages of the prior art. A particular goal of the present invention is to offer a method and a device for managing communications in conferences that can increase the efficiency and productivity of conferences.
The invention achieves this goal at least partially by means of the features in the independent claims. Advantageous embodiments and developments of the invention are provided in the dependent claims.